


bayamim hahem, baz'man hazeh (in the days of old, and in this moment)

by MissjuliaMiriam



Series: Jewish Juno [1]
Category: The Penumbra Podcast
Genre: (this fic is only sort of about Mag), Fluff, Hanukkah, Jewish Juno Steel, M/M, Mild Hurt/Comfort, Other, Religious Themes, TPP Secret Santa 2018, this is soft
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-24
Updated: 2018-12-24
Packaged: 2019-09-26 11:57:49
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,134
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17141321
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/MissjuliaMiriam/pseuds/MissjuliaMiriam
Summary: In which candles are lit, stories are told, and revolutions are remembered.My gift for Ernmark in the 2018 TPP Secret Santa exchange!





	bayamim hahem, baz'man hazeh (in the days of old, and in this moment)

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Ernmark (M_Moonshade)](https://archiveofourown.org/users/M_Moonshade/gifts).



> Okay, a few notes:
> 
> First, despite this being SUPER self-indulgent, it is in fact gift fic for the Secret Santa. So: Merry Christmas/Happy Holidays to you in particular, Ernmark! You requested "something with Mag" and I was like, well, Mag's a rebel, he'd probably be happy being honoured in spirit in a fic about Hanukkah, even if he's sort of Sir Not Appearing In This Fic. There are quotes from Angel of Brahma pt. 2 in here, so he's... sort of here. Anyway, I hope you like it!
> 
> Second, the title is from the tail end of the second verse of the Hanukkah prayer - its translation is also up there. I felt it was appropriate! However, my Hebrew is non-existent, so if someone with better Hebrew reads this and is like "you plucked out the wrong words" just... tell me and I'll fix it. For anyone who wants, the prayer in full can be found (and listened to) [here.](https://reformjudaism.org/practice/prayers-blessings/hanukkah-blessings) We sing the first two verses every night, and the third verse (the Shehecheyanu) only on the first night.
> 
> Third, any fucked up formatting is courtesy of Google Docs. I tried.
> 
> Please enjoy the fic!

 

Juno and Peter are just sitting down to dinner when Juno glances at the calendar hanging on the wall, says, “Shit,” and scrambles back up out of his seat, making a beeline for the hall closet.

“Juno?” Peter asks, concerned. He sets down his plate and follows, accepting a box when Juno pulls it out of the closet and absently passes it to him, then continues digging through their things for whatever it is he’s looking for.

“Aha!” Juno pulls out another box, a dingy cardboard shoebox with unfamiliar characters written on the side of it, and he turns to Peter. “I almost forgot. Put that back while I set up.”

Peter blinks after him as he turns and heads toward the kitchen, but does as instructed, returning the box he’s holding to the closet, then follows Juno. When he gets to the kitchen, Juno has set down the box and opened it, and is carefully lifting out a metal candelabra, tarnished with age and marred here and there with drops of multicoloured wax. Juno puts the candelabra down on the windowsill and uses a fingernail to pick off the wax, then turns and says to Peter, “Grab the box of candles? There should be some matches in there somewhere too.”

“ _Matches_?” Peter mutters to himself, but again does as he’s told, going over to dig through the box. There is, as promised, a box of candles and toward the bottom a small box of matches, as well as a few square-sided wooden spinning tops with more unfamiliar characters on them and a plastic mesh baggie filled with foil-covered chocolate coins. “Juno, what on earth is going on?”

“Oh,” Juno says, accepting the matches and the candles from Peter. “Right—guess you wouldn’t know. Uh, so, I’ve mentioned I’m Jewish right? Er. Ish. Jewish-ish.”

“Yes,” Peter says, remembering the brief conversation they’d had about it. He’d found a necklace among Juno’s jewelry with strung with wooden beads carved with—now that he thinks back—characters similar to those written on the box, and he’d asked Juno about it, struck by its simple beauty. Juno had explained that the characters spelled his Hebrew name, _Ishmael,_ and a little about his background.

“It’s the first night of Hanukkah tonight. It’s…” Juno waves a hand. “It’s not really one of the major holidays? But growing up, Benten really liked it. When we were really little we’d run around pretending to be the Maccabees, and when we got older… it was an easy thing to do in our room, without disturbing mom.”

As he speaks, Juno is getting candles out of the box, and sets one in the central, raised candle-holder, and one on the far right, then closes the box again.

“You don’t fill it?” Peter asks, stepping closer to join Juno by the window.

Juno shakes his head. “The holiday lasts 8 days. Nights, whatever—Jewish calendar days start at sundown, so.”

“One more each night?”

Juno makes an affirmative noise, then opens the box of matches and fishes one out. “I’m gonna… sing. Don’t judge. Then we can have dinner, sorry.”

“It’s alright,” Peter says softly, and watches as Juno lights the middle candle, blows out the match, and then picks up the lit candle. He holds it for a moment, takes a deep breath, and then sings quietly as he lights the other candle and then replaces the central candle. The song—the prayer, Peter thinks—has three verses, and though Juno isn’t a trained singer by any means and his voice cracks a little in the first line, the tune is simple and sweet and heartfelt.

When Juno is finished, he takes another deep breath, exhaling carefully to avoid blowing out the candle, then he says, “Let’s eat.”

 

_“Lesson one of thieving: never go in outnumbered?”_

 

Over dinner, Juno explains, “It’s sort of a historical celebration, with the God stuff tacked on. A really long time ago—and I mean _really_ , like ten thousand years or something—back in the early days of Judaism, the Jewish homeland got taken over by, uh, some guy with an unpronounceable name? I honestly have forgotten a lot of the details. But yeah: asshole with a dumb name, and he was running shit, and telling the Jews not to be Jews. And he fucked up the Temple, which was a really big deal. So the Jewish people, led by these guys called the Maccabees, had a rebellion about it.”

“They sound like my kind of people,” Peter says, after swallowing a mouthful of food.

“Oh yeah,” Juno says, and grins at him. “Real revolutionaries, those guys. Good fighters, too; I always looked up to them. Fighting for what’s right, for their right to exist… I don’t know. I liked it.”

“I can imagine.”

Juno hums and eats another bite, and for a moment there’s only the sound of cutlery clinking. Peter takes a sip of wine. Then Juno continues, “Underdog story, too. Whatshisface had a bigass army of professional soldiers, and these guys were literally an old dude and his sons and their friends, and they ran off into the hills with farming tools and shit. But they won.”

Peter looks into Juno’s eyes—his eye, the lost one a token to his own underdog’s struggle against the big man in charge—and thinks he can understand. “If you don’t like the odds, change them,” he offers.

Juno smiles.

 

 _“I want the wealthy to fear me and those in need to call for me. I want_ _—_ _”_

_“Whoa, whoa! Save some future for later, won’t you?”_

 

“They sound like they were heroes,” Peter says, a while later. They’re eating mostly in silence, comfortable and domestic in a way that Peter never imagined he could be. The room smells of food and faintly of wax and candle smoke, and in the window sill the two candles are slowly burning down, the light reflecting on the glass and casting a warm, flickering light. “The Maccabees, I mean.”

“They were,” Juno says. “To me, at least. Without them and people like them, I wouldn’t be Jewish today.”

“No, I suppose not.”

“And they were… something to look up to, I guess. If you ignore the uglier aspects. They fought for what they believed in, gave their lives for it, won a future for their people.”

Peter reaches across the table to lay his hand on Juno’s cheek and brush his thumb across the lower edge of the eyepatch Juno is wearing. When he sits back again, he says, “Well, you seem to have lived up to them, darling.”

“I’d like to think so.” Juno shrugs, takes a bite of food. “I’m not much of a hero.”

“You are to me,” Peter says.

His tone, loving and tender, makes Juno blush and duck his head to cram another bite of food in his mouth, to spare himself babbling any sappy bullshit in return.

“Anyone who fights to defend others—and don’t try to say you do otherwise—is a hero in my eyes, Juno,” Peter insists.

“Whatever you say,” Juno mumbles. “But I’m no revolutionary.”

 

_“I said we were going to take down New Kinshasa!”_

_“I didn’t think you meant_ literally _!”_

 

“Tell me more, then,” Peter says. “I’d like to hear the whole story.”

Juno swallows his bite of food. “Sure. Like I said, there was an asshole running the place. He wanted the Jews to stop being Jews—story of our lives—and sacrifice to his god instead of ours. Some people… I mean, I can’t blame them, I’d probably have bowed to it too. I care about being Jewish but not enough to _die_ for it, though I guess things were different back then for a lot of reasons.”

“But some people were willing to die?”

“Yeah,” Juno says. “And some people were willing to kill. The leader of the revolt, Matityahu—or Mattathias, whatever, Hebrew—he killed another Jew who was going to make the sacrifice.”

Peter takes advantage of Juno’s pause to take a careful sip of his wine, and then he says, “He believed that strongly that what he was doing was right? Necessary?”

“Enough to kill his own people,” Juno confirms, his gaze steady on Peter’s face. There’s a long pause, and Peter doesn’t know what his face is doing, but eventually Juno says, “Do you want to talk about it?”

“You already know,” Peter says, and his voice comes out much more strained than he wanted it to. He clears his throat. “You… you saw.”

They’ve had a version of that conversation, enough so that Peter knows now how much Juno saw, at least in vague terms. That he knows about Brahma and the Guardian Angel System, and Mag. What happened to Mag… and to Peter Nureyev.

“I saw,” Juno says. “But that wasn’t what I asked. Do you want to talk _about_ it?”

Peter hesitates, then shakes his head. “Not right now.”

Juno nods and leaves it at that.

 

_“I’m home for the first time!”_

 

“When the war was over,” Juno says, “and the dust settled, and the fucker and his army were gone, the Maccabees went home.”

“To the Temple?”

Juno nods. “Back then, well, it wasn’t like it was now. The Temple _was_ Judaism. So they went back to it, but it was a fuckin’ mess. They had to clean it up, make it sacred again.”

“This is where the ‘God stuff’ comes in,” Peter guesses, and Juno nods again.

“They had to rededicate the Temple. There’s a bunch of ceremony tied to it, and it was actually the Maccabees who made it a holiday, to remember and celebrate the rededication.” Juno laughs, shakes his head. “A little full of themselves, huh? Anyway, the rabbis, later on, they told this story about it: that when they got to the Temple, they had to relight the lamp in the holy central room, but there was only enough oil for one day, and it’d take a runner eight days to get back with more. They sent the guy right away, obviously, but that wasn’t gonna be enough… except it was.”

Peter glances over toward the window again, the candelabra with its nine candle placements: the central one, used to light the others, and eight more. “Let me guess: somehow, miraculously, the oil lasted the eight days and nights until the runner could return with more oil?”

“Exactly,” Juno says, pointing at him. “You’re good at this. So they could rededicate the Temple, thanks to that miracle, and reclaim their home. Make it theirs again.”

“I can only imagine the relief,” Peter murmurs, and means it. He can _only_ imagine it. The feeling of homecoming he’d experienced in New Kinshasa would forever be soured for him by the truth he’d learned before Mag’s death, but… it didn’t stop him from longing for the same again. Maybe one day he’d be able to return to Brahma, drive out the interlopers, and reclaim his home as the Maccabees had done… maybe.

 

_“In the face of uncertainty, a revolution crumbles.”_

 

They finish dinner and do the dishes side-by-side, and afterward Peter kisses Juno’s fingertips, pruney from the water. Instead of retiring to the couch, by silent agreement they sit back down at the table to watch as the candles finish burning down and flicker out. Once they have, Peter says, “Do you believe the story? About the oil?”

“No,” Juno says immediately, then tilts his head. “Well, I don’t believe it _literally_ happened. Some people do, I guess, but… meh. That’s not what matters, anyway.”

Juno pauses, but Peter, watching his face, thinks that he might have more to say, so he waits him out. Sure enough, after a few silent seconds, Juno continues, “I don’t believe the story about the oil, but I do believe that the important part of the story of the Maccabees isn’t the war they fought or the people they killed, or even their bravery, or whatever. It was their determination. Their commitment to their ultimate goal, which was… preservation, I guess.”

“Of what?”

Juno shrugs. “Call it whatever you want. Tradition or history or identity or something. The soul of the Jewish people. In the end, all the stuff they did… it was because they knew that if they didn’t do it, Judaism would be gone. Or so different that it might as well be gone.”

“And the oil is about a return to that tradition,” Peter says.

“Yeah. It’s… it’s about the really important thing. Which is that no matter what shit the world puts us through, the Jews have survived, continued to believe, and let our own stubbornness in believing be the source of our enduring light in dark times.” Juno sounds a little like he’s quoting, and when he finishes he ducks his head, embarrassed.

Peter smiles and pulls Juno’s hand across the table so that he can kiss those scarred, beloved knuckles, and he says with his lips brushing Juno’s skin, “It sounds to me like you do a good job of being Jewish, my dear.”

Juno looks up again and smiles wryly. “Sometimes.”

 

_“Know that I will always be among you, that I could be anywhere, anyone, for I have no name, no past, no identity, and I never will again.”_

 

Conversation drifts, and they retire to the couch. They chat for a while, then Peter sprawls with his head in Juno’s lap and they watch an episode of some documentary stream on the television, something about Proxima’s wildlife. It’s soothing, but not very distracting, so Juno doesn’t startle when Peter suddenly turns his head to look up at him and says, “It’s been twenty years and I still don’t know how to feel about it.”

Juno turns down the volume on the stream and then runs a hand through Peter’s hair, making him sigh and tilt his head into the caress like a plant turning toward the sun. Even after all this time. “About it, or about him?”

Peter shrugs, his eyes drifting closed. “Are they different?”

“I think so,” Juno says. “Dealing with my own shit taught me that I needed to separate my feelings about _her_ from my feelings about what she did. Not that we’re exactly the same, but maybe you need… something similar.”

Peter swallows, nods. “I suppose,” he says softly. “It just… it was such a long time ago.”

“So was the Maccabean Revolt,” Juno points out. “We haven’t forgotten.”

“But that was something _good_. The Maccabees… they were fighting for their right to live as they believed was correct. For their right to choose.”

“So was Mag,” Juno says. Peter flinches very minutely, but he thinks that after years of familiarity Juno probably saw it; in response, Juno strokes his hair again. “It’s all complicated. They were fighting for their right to exist, to be free, but that doesn’t justify everything that they did. It was a war, and a lot of people died, and some of those people were innocent. The ends were ultimately good, but that doesn’t mean the means were actually _justified_.”

“So you think I should have let him do it? Let New Kinshasa fall?”

Juno continues to run his hand through Peter’s hair, occasionally pauses to stroke his thumb across his hairline, soothing and mellow. “No, I think what you did was right. I think you were doing what _you_ thought was right, is what’s more important—you figured out where your line was and refused to cross it, even if it might have been easier.”

“Nothing about it was easy,” Peter whispers. “It happened so fast, but…”

“You had to give up everything.”

“I _sacrificed_ everything. Because of him. _For_ him. But he _lied_ to me, so… was it really worth anything at all? In the end, I did nothing. The Guardian Angel System is still active. Mag is dead. And I’m… no one.” Peter closes his eyes, tries not to tremble. Every day with Juno he feels like he regains a little more of himself, but that doesn’t make it simple or straightforward, or mean that he doesn’t have moments where he remembers that he gave up his entire self to a man who betrayed him, good cause or no. Some part of him, he thinks, will always be lying on the floor in a red-tinted reactor room in a floating city on a faraway planet, bleeding out. And is the rest worth anything?

Juno bends down until he can brush his lips against Peter’s forehead. When he’s upright again, he says, “You’re still Peter Nureyev to me. And to them. They’ll never forget you, Peter.”

Peter sighs, looks up at Juno, and thinks, _He thinks it’s worth everything_. He says, “I love you, Juno.”

“Me too, you sap.”

 

_“I promise you I won’t disappear.”_

 

“Can I celebrate with you?” Peter asks, some time later. After he’s shed a few tears under the beloved weight of Juno’s tenderness and then collected himself again, taken a moment to breathe. “The rest of Hanukkah, that is?”

“Of course. It’s meant to be shared, really,” Juno says. “That’s why we put the menorah in the window—to share the light.”

“I’m grateful.”

“Whatever you want.” Juno runs his hand through Peter’s hair again. “You can celebrate any of the holidays with me. We can talk about them all some time, decide if there’re any we want to try to do something for.”

“Certainly,” Peter says. “You have so many traditions. And they’ve lasted so long—I’m amazed they haven’t been forgotten.”

“Jews never really forget anything,” Juno says, shrugging. “I mean. We do. Obviously we do. Things have changed a lot in the thousands of years that this religion has been alive, and we’ve had to change too. But we try to remember the things that have shaped us and the things that make us _us_ … and anyway, this one sort of made it into the Bible, which is one thing that definitely hasn’t changed.”

“I see,” Peter says. “History seems so ephemeral nowadays. There’s been so much of it that the events of a year, even a century, seem like… nothing at all.”

Juno nods. “Yeah. Things happen, people live and die. Time passes.”

“And we forget. It all just… disappears.”

“It sure seems to,” Juno says. “But at the same time, it doesn’t, does it? It all _happened_. It was real to someone, somewhere.”

“Brahma was real to me.”

“To me, too.”

Peter sits up finally and twists around so that he can kiss Juno’s cheek, and then his lips. “Thank you.”

“For what?”

Peter smiles. “Of course you’d ask that. For keeping me from disappearing, I suppose.”

Juno cups Peter’s cheek in his hand and kisses him back, then says, “You did promise.”

**Author's Note:**

> Comments and kudos are welcome as always! 
> 
> Expect to see more Jewish Juno from me - it's sort of my pet headcanon and I've been having a lot of fun. Also, giving myself a lot of feelings by way of projecting really a lot of my feelings about Judaism onto Juno. Don't judge.


End file.
